Newspaper to list more gun permits

Sunday

Dec 30, 2012 at 12:01 AMDec 30, 2012 at 10:44 AM

NEW YORK - A suburban New York newspaper that sparked an uproar among gun enthusiasts by publishing names and addresses of residents holding pistol permits now plans to publish even more identities of locals with permits.

NEW YORK — A suburban New York newspaper that sparked an uproar among gun enthusiasts by publishing names and addresses of residents holding pistol permits now plans to publish even more identities of locals with permits.

Names and addresses will be added as they become available to a map published on Monday in the Journal News in White Plains, N.Y., the newspaper said.

The original map listed thousands of pistol-permit holders in suburban Westchester and Rockland counties north of New York City.

Along with an article entitled “The gun owner next door: What you don’t know about the weapons in your neighborhood,” the map was compiled in response to the Dec. 14 shooting deaths of 26 children and adults in a school in Newtown, Conn., editors of the Gannett Corp.-owned newspaper said.

The next batch of names will be permit holders in suburban Putnam County, N.Y., where the county clerk told the newspaper the office still is compiling information.

About 44,000 people are licensed to own pistols in the three counties, the newspaper said. Owners of rifles and shotguns do not need permits, the newspaper said.

The publication prompted outrage among gun owners.

“Do you fools realize that you also made a map for criminals to use to find homes to rob that have no guns in them to protect themselves?” Rob Seubert of Silver Spring, Md., posted on the newspaper’s website. “What a bunch of liberal boobs you all are.”

A similar bill that he introduced in the past as an assemblyman died in the state Assembly.

“The asinine editors at the Journal News have once again gone out of their way to place a virtual scarlet letter on law-abiding firearm owners throughout the region,” Ball wrote on his Senate website.

The newspaper’s editor, CynDee Royle, defended the decision to list the permit holders.

“We knew publication of the database would be controversial, but we felt sharing as much information as we could about gun ownership in our area was important in the aftermath of the Newtown shootings,” she said.

Some critics retaliated by posting reporters’ and editors’ addresses and other personal information online.

Howard Good, a journalism professor at the State University of New York at New Paltz, called the critics’ response childish.

“It doesn’t move the issue of gun control to the level of intelligent public discussion,” he said. “Instead, it transforms what should be a rational public debate on a contentious issue into ugly gutter fighting.”

Media critic Al Tompkins of the Poynter Institute wrote that the newspaper’s reporting had not gone far enough to justify the permit holders’ loss of privacy.

“If journalists could show flaws in the gun-permitting system, that would be newsworthy,” he said. “Or, for example, if gun owners were exempted from permits because of political connections, then journalists could better justify the privacy invasion.”